Author’s Note: This article is paired with the LENS.tv video production “US Missile Base Upsets the Morning Calm: Report on THAAD Deployment in South Korea)
Seongja, SOUTH KOREA — This idyllic valley of peach orchards, melon patches and tiny swatches of rice paddy is humming, not with bees but from an odd whine as irritating as a buzzing mosquito. The tinnitus-like sensation in one’s inner ear comes from the X-band range of the electromagnetic spectrum, which borders on the frequency of microwave ovens. The X-band waves, approximately 3 cm in height, cause water molecules to jiggle, and since the human body is about 90 percent water, anyone who gets close enough to the radar unit will boil like a one-minute meal. The interior of the ear is especially sensitive because the microwaves cause its fluid called the endolymph to heat up, resulting in the hydrops disorder, which causes dizziness, loss of balance and falling.
Meanwhile, the vibrations of a powerful electricity generator for the radar unit rumble through the granite of the surrounding peaks, causing infants to cry and villagers to lose sleep. The alien disruptions are coming from a missile-interceptor system operated by the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Missile Defense Command (BMDC) located just a kilometer around the bend, installed a year ago in late August 2016.
By early autumn the disruptive sonic emissions triggered nonviolent protests by thousands of residents from here and nearby Gimcheong township. When Army trucks forced their way through the crowds, the villagers responded by raising barriers of granite stones and a manned checkpoint to block the only road into the missile site. To avoid negative publicity from truck collisions, the US Army decided to ferry in personnel and supplies by helicopter to the missile camp. For months, the rattle of low-flying choppers has further aggravated local tempers against the unwanted invaders.
Are the village fears of radar threats to human health exaggerated, just another instance of rural folklore? The authoritative answer came from the American captain who commanded the first THAAD deployment a decade ago in Shariki, northwest Japan. ““The system is serious — it could burn a person standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.” With its range of 1,000 miles (twice that when the reflection off target is included), military X-band is millions of times more powerful than an average household microwave oven.
End to the Morning Calm
On orders from the presidential Blue House, the national police reacted by prevented the villagers from marching on the military installment by posting “No Entry” signs further up the lane at a crossroads. There, two monks and a nun are sitting under a canopy in appeal for removal of the war-making equipment from this valley, the one-time parish of the second-ranked founder of the Korean faith known as Won Buddhism. The aluminum poles of their first tent, smashed by the police, are piled on the roadside.
Along the walk back to the village center, a shopkeeper offers me a sample of the small yellow melons that put Seongju on the nation’s culinary map. Peeled and sliced, the fruit renders a sweet and mildly salty flavor, a perfect counter to fiery kimchee. Under an open-air roof, local parishioners are conducting the Won liturgy of bowing and supplicating for peace and calm.
There I am greeted by Im Sun Bung, the leader of village’s women’s committee, which provides social support and counseling for mothers and children. “We cannot accept that the peaceful tradition of our village has been violated for war-making,” she explained. “My farmland’s been in my brother’s family for a century, and before than with our ancestors for countless centuries. This military intrusion is intolerable.”
The police presence forces me to walk with a young Won monk to walk through the woods for a view of the missile site. Along the way, the orchards are visibly bare of green fruit. According to student volunteers from a teachers college in Busan, X-band radar has been causing arboreal sterility for the first time ever in the centuries-long history of Seongju. I noted the absence of bees among the few roadside flowers. The valley is dying.
A strenuous climb straight up a hillside eventually reached a geological rosary of limestone boulders, called since ancient times Bodhi Peak. Its namesake is Bodhidharma, the Indian-born founder of Zen who meditated inside the Shadow Cave at Shaolin, the world-renowned center of kungfu. The young monk-guide Kang Hyen Wook explained this area was the home parishs of the second founder of Won (원불교), the broad-based Korean Buddhist revivalism movement. Gasping for breath with each uphill step, I am walking on holy ground.
At the summit, monk Kang said, “The peace and calm of this sacred valley has been broken by the deployment of weapons of war.”
The Long Valley
Down below, a narrow road curves a kilometer from Seongju village on our right (east) to the Lotte Sky Hill golf resort, where an 8-barreled THAAD launcher pointed at the sky sits on the fairway near the 18th hole. It’s an empty shell because the missiles have yet to be delivered from Raytheon’s factory in Alabama. They’re not needed anyway because the real weapon is the X-band radar.
The upland valley was chosen over a nearby South Korean artillery base because of its altitude of more than 600 meters above sea level, which provides a head-start against incoming ballistic missiles dropping down from the upper atmosphere. On the other side of the lozenge-shaped golf course, rugged hills extend northward, cupping the upper floors of apartment blocks in Gimcheon town. The monk jokes: “The American soldiers seem to enjoy playing golf without paying the price of a club membership.”
On the far side of the fairways are a huge twin-towered country club, which serves as the command-and-control center for the THAAD launchers, and a red-roofed luxury hotel, now used as a barracks for 100 artillerymen and defense contractors with Chenowit Native Alaskan Corporation, a minority-business shell company for Academi (formerly known as Blackwater).
Peering through heavy binoculars, I notice the truck-mounted X-band radar nestled under the cover of trees by a southside pond. Then a sideways scan a clutter of containers and long steel boxes, probably containing mid-range rockets, then a Patriot launch vehicle that was delivered piecemeal and was now being assembled.
This is a stunning discovery because the Pentagon had argued that the THAAD batteries were necessary to protect South Koreans from Pyongyang’s ballistic missiles, the ground for gaining permission from the since-deposed government of President Park Geun-hye. In contrast to THAAD, which targets large high-altitude missiles during their re-entry into the atmosphere, the Patriot system focuses on low-flying intermediate-range rockets.
Why, nearly a year after the THAAD deployment, was a Patriot-3 unit being deployed here? The answer was obvious: To defend the supercarriers USS Carl Vinson and Ronald Reagan against land-to-sea anti-ship missiles. The Patriot, and probably the THAAD X-band radar too, are not here to protect South Korean cities but to provide with US armed forces with an offensive military advantage against North Korea, and possibly China and Russia as well.
Focusing the zoom of my digital camera toward the Patriot launcher, I realized that this was the portrait of yet another tall tale from the Pentagon, in line with the Tonkin Gulf incident and the Saddam WMD story.
Target China and Russia East
If the actual focus of the Raytheon-Lockheed Martin THAAD system at Seongju is North Korea, then it is completely superfluous, a ridiculous waste of $1 billion in American taxpayers’ money. The Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea (DPRK) is already triple-covered by the three THAAD X-band systems already based in Japan, including the Japan Air Self-Defense Force (ASDF) stations at Shariki, Tsugaru district on the northwest tip of Honshu, Kyotango, Kyoto Province, near the Maizuru naval base on the Japan Sea/East Sea, and Kadena Airbase in Okinawa. The wave-interference of double coverage by X-band radar enables detection of flying objects at a millimeter level. Therefore, the X-band radar in South Korea is aimed at the Shenyang Military District in Northeast China and at Beijing.
The X-band radar component has a minimum range of 1,000 miles, meaning the Japanese installations cover the entire Asian continental airspace over the Sea of Okhotsk down to Hainan, the major Chinese naval base in the South China Sea. The former designation of THAAD was FBXT (Forward Base X-band Transportable) gave away the fact that THAAD is not a defensive system; rather so-called missile defense provides a cover for over-the-horizon aerial surveillance, aircraft targeting and electronic warfare. THAAD is a weapon of offense being deployed against China’s People’s Liberation Army and the Russian Eastern Military Region, which includes the naval base at Vladivostok and forward bases in Kamchatka.
The concept of “kinetic” interception, or direct hits on incoming ballistic missiles, is preposterous, with the only “proof” being rigged repetitive tests at a 25-kilometer-wide target range at Kwajalein atoll in the Marshall Islands. The real mission is to detect aircraft and missiles deep inside enemy territory and knock out their electronic piloting systems.
The electronic warfare role of X-band radar (“X” stands for Top Secret) and other passive-array radar (PAR) has been demonstrated time and again in accidents and blackouts. The first known shipboard PAR-caused incident occurred on October 1986, which was immediately hushed-up, according to one of the crew members who told me: “Admiral (then captain) Jeremy ‘Mike’ Boord was an enthusiastic advocate of high-tech innovations, including advanced radar. After the commissioning of a new navy ship, he ordered the crew to switch on the radar and it immediately knocked out the power at LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) and grounded all the flights.”
Deliberate use of X-band radar is the probable cause of the downing of Russian aircraft heading for the Eastern Mediterranean, including the crash that killed a renowned army chorus. An X-band unit is stationed at Incirlik Airbase in Turkey.
The most recent radar-caused accident was the mid-June collision of the destroyer USS Fitzgerald and a Japanese merchant ship, whose radar and sonar systems, were scrambled and disabled by the frigate’s PAR unit. Seven American sailors were killed in ramming. As the saying goes: “We’ve met the enemy and it is us.” The narrow-focused radar is doing a fine job of wiping out the enemy.
Connivery, Corruption and Collaboration
How a luxury resort on the list of South Korea’s 30 top golf courses was converted into an unregistered and illegal military base stems from the endemic corruption that led to the ouster of President Park Geun-hye, which has its roots in anti-independence collaboration during the half-century of Japanese militarist domination and colonial rule over Korea.
In June 2016, South Korean prosecutors raided the Seoul offices of the Lotte Group, following mutually incriminating accusations in the bitter succession struggle between rival heirs, the younger Shin Dong-bin (Akio Shigemitsu) and elder Shin Dong-joo (Hiroyuki Shigemitsu). This fraternal dispute arises from the dual identity of the Shin/Shigemitsu family, whose founder Shin Kyuk-ho married Hatsuko Shigemitsu, the daughter of a wartime Japanese foreign minister, in 1952.
The rise of the Shin dynasty is a Horatio Alger story, and every bit as dubious, of a poor young immigrant Korean candy vendor amassing a fortune in wartime Japan and marrying into high society in Tokyo. There are obviously missing pieces in this fable. His second wife’s father, Mamoru Shigemitsu, was an insider of the Manchukuo faction led by Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka (who led Japan’s walkout from the League of Nations, the actual start of World War II) and Munitions Minister Nobusuke Kishi, the grandfather of the current Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe.
The recently resigned president’s father, the military dictator Park Chung-hee, was a wartime collaborator who served as a military intelligence agent hunting down Korean nationalist rebels in the Manchurian mountains. Manchukuo still casts a long shadow over the Korean Peninsula, Japan and more recently the United States.
As the chief financial bureaucrat for puppet state Manchukuo and occupied Korea, Kishi was the architect of the system of state-directed defense-civilian conglomerates called chaebol in Korean and keiretsu in Japanese. These monstrous industrial groups created in Manchukuo included Nissan, Showa Steel, Industrial Bank of Japan (IBJ, now Mizuho), and Samsung (which started as a dried fish supplier to the Japanese Army in China). The Shin Kyuk-ho biography is therefore full of holes, because without connection to the Manchukuo group, a poor immigrant from Ulsan had no chance of entering Waseda high school or marrying the daughter of a foreign minister, which raises touchy questions about the Lotte founder’s actual parentage in Japanese-occupied Korea.
The recent investigation into this imperialism-compromised clan led to a ban against the public listing of Lotte Hotels on the Korea Exchange (KE, known for the KOSPI Index), putting the Lotte Sky Hill golf resort into a financial limbo. The probe was apparently forestalled by President Park, who thereby managed to extract the Seongju resort for a missile site. At the time, every province and major district in South Korea opposed stationing the THAAD system in their locale, except Gumi, North Gyeongsangbuk, the birthplace of Park clan. The nearest big cities are Pusan, General Park’s political constituency, and Ulsan, the hometown of the Shin-Shigemitsu clan.
The third partner in the Korean-Japanese family drama is, of course, the US military, which occupies bases in both countries and helps American defense corporations sell weapons to these East Asian economies, lining the pockets of the Yank generals and admirals. Conveniently, once the THAAD basing deal was done, the vice chairman of Lotte, Lee In-won, was found dead in that same month of August. His mysterious demise is typical of Manchukuo methods of compromise.
A New Radiation Threat in the Asian Arms Race
Crude cultural insensitivity has verged into sacrilege, done by American and not just the US Army and its Ballistic Missile Defense Command but also the U.S. Embassy and State Department, whose diplomats and country-experts should have known better. Lame excuses are unacceptable when considering the six decades of American military presence on the Korean Peninsula since the Korean War. Expediency, war hysteria and salesmanship of weapon systems have again overruled common sense and the good conduct expected of allies.
THAAD deployment in Japan and South Korea represents the acceleration of a regional arms race involving electronic and electromagnetic weaponry, which are invisible and emit far-reaching types of deadly radiation. Of course, Moscow and Beijing are not resigned to passivity but can be expected to retaliate by unleashing powerful electronic signals on American military bases in Asia and even against United States, which will convert every office, home and golf club into gigantic microwave ovens. Temperatures are rising, and blood will soon boil.
Yoichi Shimatsu, former editor with the Japan Times group, is a science writer based in Hong Kong.
Under Dharma Peak: South Korean villagers blockade a US missile defense base
By Yoichi Shimatsu
Note: This article is paired with the LENS.tv video production “US Missile Base Upsets the Morning Calm: Report on THAAD Deployment in South Korea)
Seongja, SOUTH KOREA — This idyllic valley of peach orchards, melon patches and tiny swatches of rice paddy is humming, not with bees but from an odd whine as irritating as a buzzing mosquito. The tinnitus-like sensation in one’s inner ear comes from the X-band range of the electromagnetic spectrum, which borders on the frequency of microwave ovens. The X-band waves, approximately 3 cm in height, cause water molecules to jiggle, and since the human body is about 90 percent water, anyone who gets close enough to the radar unit will boil like a one-minute meal. The interior of the ear is especially sensitive because the microwaves cause its fluid called the endolymph to heat up, resulting in the hydrops disorder, which causes dizziness, loss of balance and falling.
Meanwhile, the vibrations of a powerful electricity generator for the radar unit rumble through the granite of the surrounding peaks, causing infants to cry and villagers to lose sleep. The alien disruptions are coming from a missile-interceptor system operated by the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Missile Defense Command (BMDC) located just a kilometer around the bend, installed a year ago in late August 2016.
By early autumn the disruptive sonic emissions triggered nonviolent protests by thousands of residents from here and nearby Gimcheong township. When Army trucks forced their way through the crowds, the villagers responded by raising barriers of granite stones and a manned checkpoint to block the only road into the missile site. To avoid negative publicity from truck collisions, the US Army decided to ferry in personnel and supplies by helicopter to the missile camp. For months, the rattle of low-flying choppers has further aggravated local tempers against the unwanted invaders.
Are the village fears of radar threats to human health exaggerated, just another instance of rural folklore? The authoritative answer came from the American captain who commanded the first THAAD deployment a decade ago in Shariki, northwest Japan. ““The system is serious — it could burn a person standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.” With its range of 1,000 miles (twice that when the reflection off target is included), military X-band is millions of times more powerful than an average household microwave oven.
End to the Morning Calm
On orders from the presidential Blue House, the national police reacted by prevented the villagers from marching on the military installment by posting “No Entry” signs further up the lane at a crossroads. There, two monks and a nun are sitting under a canopy in appeal for removal of the war-making equipment from this valley, the one-time parish of the second-ranked founder of the Korean faith known as Won Buddhism. The aluminum poles of their first tent, smashed by the police, are piled on the roadside.
Along the walk back to the village center, a shopkeeper offers me a sample of the small yellow melons that put Seongju on the nation’s culinary map. Peeled and sliced, the fruit renders a sweet and mildly salty flavor, a perfect counter to fiery kimchee. Under an open-air roof, local parishioners are conducting the Won liturgy of bowing and supplicating for peace and calm.
There I am greeted by Im Sun Bung, the leader of village’s women’s committee, which provides social support and counseling for mothers and children. “We cannot accept that the peaceful tradition of our village has been violated for war-making,” she explained. “My farmland’s been in my brother’s family for a century, and before than with our ancestors for countless centuries. This military intrusion is intolerable.”
The police presence forces me to walk with a young Won monk to walk through the woods for a view of the missile site. Along the way, the orchards are visibly bare of green fruit. According to student volunteers from a teachers college in Busan, X-band radar has been causing arboreal sterility for the first time ever in the centuries-long history of Seongju. I noted the absence of bees among the few roadside flowers. The valley is dying.
A strenuous climb straight up a hillside eventually reached a geological rosary of limestone boulders, called since ancient times Bodhi Peak. Its namesake is Bodhidharma, the Indian-born founder of Zen who meditated inside the Shadow Cave at Shaolin, the world-renowned center of kungfu. The young monk-guide Kang Hyen Wook explained this area was the home parishs of the second founder of Won (원불교), the broad-based Korean Buddhist revivalism movement. Gasping for breath with each uphill step, I am walking on holy ground.
At the summit, monk Kang said, “The peace and calm of this sacred valley has been broken by the deployment of weapons of war.”
The Long Valley
Down below, a narrow road curves a kilometer from Seongju village on our right (east) to the Lotte Sky Hill golf resort, where an 8-barreled THAAD launcher pointed at the sky sits on the fairway near the 18th hole. It’s an empty shell because the missiles have yet to be delivered from Raytheon’s factory in Alabama. They’re not needed anyway because the real weapon is the X-band radar.
The upland valley was chosen over a nearby South Korean artillery base because of its altitude of more than 600 meters above sea level, which provides a head-start against incoming ballistic missiles dropping down from the upper atmosphere. On the other side of the lozenge-shaped golf course, rugged hills extend northward, cupping the upper floors of apartment blocks in Gimcheon town. The monk jokes: “The American soldiers seem to enjoy playing golf without paying the price of a club membership.”
On the far side of the fairways are a huge twin-towered country club, which serves as the command-and-control center for the THAAD launchers, and a red-roofed luxury hotel, now used as a barracks for 100 artillerymen and defense contractors with Chenowit Native Alaskan Corporation, a minority-business shell company for Academi (formerly known as Blackwater).
Peering through heavy binoculars, I notice the truck-mounted X-band radar nestled under the cover of trees by a southside pond. Then a sideways scan a clutter of containers and long steel boxes, probably containing mid-range rockets, then a Patriot launch vehicle that was delivered piecemeal and was now being assembled.
This is a stunning discovery because the Pentagon had argued that the THAAD batteries were necessary to protect South Koreans from Pyongyang’s ballistic missiles, the ground for gaining permission from the since-deposed government of President Park Geun-hye. In contrast to THAAD, which targets large high-altitude missiles during their re-entry into the atmosphere, the Patriot system focuses on low-flying intermediate-range rockets.
Why, nearly a year after the THAAD deployment, was a Patriot-3 unit being deployed here? The answer was obvious: To defend the supercarriers USS Carl Vinson and Ronald Reagan against land-to-sea anti-ship missiles. The Patriot, and probably the THAAD X-band radar too, are not here to protect South Korean cities but to provide with US armed forces with an offensive military advantage against North Korea, and possibly China and Russia as well.
Focusing the zoom of my digital camera toward the Patriot launcher, I realized that this was the portrait of yet another tall tale from the Pentagon, in line with the Tonkin Gulf incident and the Saddam WMD story.
Target China and Russia East
If the actual focus of the Raytheon-Lockheed Martin THAAD system at Seongju is North Korea, then it is completely superfluous, a ridiculous waste of $1 billion in American taxpayers’ money. The Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea (DPRK) is already triple-covered by the three THAAD X-band systems already based in Japan, including the Japan Air Self-Defense Force (ASDF) stations at Shariki, Tsugaru district on the northwest tip of Honshu, Kyotango, Kyoto Province, near the Maizuru naval base on the Japan Sea/East Sea, and Kadena Airbase in Okinawa. The wave-interference of double coverage by X-band radar enables detection of flying objects at a millimeter level. Therefore, the X-band radar in South Korea is aimed at the Shenyang Military District in Northeast China and at Beijing.
The X-band radar component has a minimum range of 1,000 miles, meaning the Japanese installations cover the entire Asian continental airspace over the Sea of Okhotsk down to Hainan, the major Chinese naval base in the South China Sea. The former designation of THAAD was FBXT (Forward Base X-band Transportable) gave away the fact that THAAD is not a defensive system; rather so-called missile defense provides a cover for over-the-horizon aerial surveillance, aircraft targeting and electronic warfare. THAAD is a weapon of offense being deployed against China’s People’s Liberation Army and the Russian Eastern Military Region, which includes the naval base at Vladivostok and forward bases in Kamchatka.
The concept of “kinetic” interception, or direct hits on incoming ballistic missiles, is preposterous, with the only “proof” being rigged repetitive tests at a 25-kilometer-wide target range at Kwajalein atoll in the Marshall Islands. The real mission is to detect aircraft and missiles deep inside enemy territory and knock out their electronic piloting systems.
The electronic warfare role of X-band radar (“X” stands for Top Secret) and other passive-array radar (PAR) has been demonstrated time and again in accidents and blackouts. The first known shipboard PAR-caused incident occurred on October 1986, which was immediately hushed-up, according to one of the crew members who told me: “Admiral (then captain) Jeremy ‘Mike’ Boord was an enthusiastic advocate of high-tech innovations, including advanced radar. After the commissioning of a new navy ship, he ordered the crew to switch on the radar and it immediately knocked out the power at LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) and grounded all the flights.”
Deliberate use of X-band radar is the probable cause of the downing of Russian aircraft heading for the Eastern Mediterranean, including the crash that killed a renowned army chorus. An X-band unit is stationed at Incirlik Airbase in Turkey.
The most recent radar-caused accident was the mid-June collision of the destroyer USS Fitzgerald and a Japanese merchant ship, whose radar and sonar systems, were scrambled and disabled by the frigate’s PAR unit. Seven American sailors were killed in ramming. As the saying goes: “We’ve met the enemy and it is us.” The narrow-focused radar is doing a fine job of wiping out the enemy.
Connivery, Corruption and Collaboration
How a luxury resort on the list of South Korea’s 30 top golf courses was converted into an unregistered and illegal military base stems from the endemic corruption that led to the ouster of President Park Geun-hye, which has its roots in anti-independence collaboration during the half-century of Japanese militarist domination and colonial rule over Korea.
In June 2016, South Korean prosecutors raided the Seoul offices of the Lotte Group, following mutually incriminating accusations in the bitter succession struggle between rival heirs, the younger Shin Dong-bin (Akio Shigemitsu) and elder Shin Dong-joo (Hiroyuki Shigemitsu). This fraternal dispute arises from the dual identity of the Shin/Shigemitsu family, whose founder Shin Kyuk-ho married Hatsuko Shigemitsu, the daughter of a wartime Japanese foreign minister, in 1952.
The rise of the Shin dynasty is a Horatio Alger story, and every bit as dubious, of a poor young immigrant Korean candy vendor amassing a fortune in wartime Japan and marrying into high society in Tokyo. There are obviously missing pieces in this fable. His second wife’s father, Mamoru Shigemitsu, was an insider of the Manchukuo faction led by Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka (who led Japan’s walkout from the League of Nations, the actual start of World War II) and Munitions Minister Nobusuke Kishi, the grandfather of the current Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe.
The recently resigned president’s father, the military dictator Park Chung-hee, was a wartime collaborator who served as a military intelligence agent hunting down Korean nationalist rebels in the Manchurian mountains. Manchukuo still casts a long shadow over the Korean Peninsula, Japan and more recently the United States.
As the chief financial bureaucrat for puppet state Manchukuo and occupied Korea, Kishi was the architect of the system of state-directed defense-civilian conglomerates called chaebol in Korean and keiretsu in Japanese. These monstrous industrial groups created in Manchukuo included Nissan, Showa Steel, Industrial Bank of Japan (IBJ, now Mizuho), and Samsung (which started as a dried fish supplier to the Japanese Army in China). The Shin Kyuk-ho biography is therefore full of holes, because without connection to the Manchukuo group, a poor immigrant from Ulsan had no chance of entering Waseda high school or marrying the daughter of a foreign minister, which raises touchy questions about the Lotte founder’s actual parentage in Japanese-occupied Korea.
The recent investigation into this imperialism-compromised clan led to a ban against the public listing of Lotte Hotels on the Korea Exchange (KE, known for the KOSPI Index), putting the Lotte Sky Hill golf resort into a financial limbo. The probe was apparently forestalled by President Park, who thereby managed to extract the Seongju resort for a missile site. At the time, every province and major district in South Korea opposed stationing the THAAD system in their locale, except Gumi, North Gyeongsangbuk, the birthplace of Park clan. The nearest big cities are Pusan, General Park’s political constituency, and Ulsan, the hometown of the Shin-Shigemitsu clan.
The third partner in the Korean-Japanese family drama is, of course, the US military, which occupies bases in both countries and helps American defense corporations sell weapons to these East Asian economies, lining the pockets of the Yank generals and admirals. Conveniently, once the THAAD basing deal was done, the vice chairman of Lotte, Lee In-won, was found dead in that same month of August. His mysterious demise is typical of Manchukuo methods of compromise.
A New Radiation Threat in the Asian Arms Race
Crude cultural insensitivity has verged into sacrilege, done by American and not just the US Army and its Ballistic Missile Defense Command but also the U.S. Embassy and State Department, whose diplomats and country-experts should have known better. Lame excuses are unacceptable when considering the six decades of American military presence on the Korean Peninsula since the Korean War. Expediency, war hysteria and salesmanship of weapon systems have again overruled common sense and the good conduct expected of allies.
THAAD deployment in Japan and South Korea represents the acceleration of a regional arms race involving electronic and electromagnetic weaponry, which are invisible and emit far-reaching types of deadly radiation. Of course, Moscow and Beijing are not resigned to passivity but can be expected to retaliate by unleashing powerful electronic signals on American military bases in Asia and even against United States, which will convert every office, home and golf club into gigantic microwave ovens. Temperatures are rising, and blood will soon boil.
Prof. Yoichi Shimatsu, Senior Advisor and Contributing Editor for The 4th Media, was former editor with the Japan Times group, is a science writer based in Hong Kong.
The 4th Media